Lifes a Precious Thing
by Gildra Evestar
Summary: A young girl is neglected by the world. Contains graphic images. Dark Fic, no pairings, PLEASE R&R Oneshot I think


**Hey all!**

**I do not own anything but the plot and Cass. **

**Please R&R**

**Yesh it is long, but I didn't want to break it up since I felt it would lose some of the impact, so bear with it and enjoy. Yeah it contains some pretty graphic stuff, you have been warned.**

* * *

_They say that before you die that your life flashes before your eyes. What they don't tell you is that you relive it. Every moment, good or bad, no exceptions. Those who die slowly (from diseases and such) get to relive their lives over many years, they have the chance to say: goodbye, I'm sorry, I forgive you, and I love you. Those who are unlucky, and die quickly, well they only have the few moments before they die to realize what went wrong, and relive they entire life in a matter of seconds._

_My name is Cassandra "Cass" Miller. I am thirteen years old, and I only have a few moments left._

* * *

Now to be honest I should have seen this coming, but as the story of my life begins to replay itself from the beginning all I can do is watch and wait, wait for the darkness to take me. 

I was born in a small farming community somewhere in Texas. My mother was only fifteen, and she gave me up to what she thoughts were responsible people. They were for a while. They gave me birthday parties, with big balloons, giant cakes, and numerous friends. On my second birthday they gave me a stuffed dog, I loved him. I would talk to him every night; eventually I named him Bobby. Shortly before my third birthday, my daddy and mommy went to dinner, I was staying with Jillian, and she was the best baby sitter. It wasn't until the next morning, when they still did not come home that I knew something was wrong. Late the night before they were in a bad accident, they were both dead.

I cried a lot that week, first when the nice policeman told me the news. I was much to young to understand what "dead" truly meant. I cried again when they lowered them into the ground, I begged the old grey minister not to burry my parents, and I was too young to understand why they were putting dirt on them. The last time I cried that week was as I was looking back on all I had ever known in life, the only place I had ever loved, the only people I knew, out of the back window of my aunt and uncle's jeep. I was on my way to New York.

Arriving in the city on my third birthday I was treated to ice cream in Central Park. I was clinging desperately to Bobby, as I licked the chocolate ice cream, and started my new life.

By the time I was five I had learned that the people who stayed quite and did as Uncle Karl said did not get in trouble. He would hit Auntie Bev all the time, when he was sober, or high, it didn't matter. I only got hit once, that's all it took to know that when he got that look in his eyes, it was time to go hide in my room and hug Bobby. He left me alone when I was the room. One night in early September things got really bad, he pushed Auntie down the stairs, and she had to go to the hospital. That where I first met the Detectives. Actually, it was only Detective Benson that night. She was really nice to me, she asked me all sorts of questions, I answered them as best as I could, except the ones I knew would make Karl mad at me. Like when she asked me if my Uncle liked to poke him self with needles. I knew that he did, that's what makes him happy, but he told me not to tell anyone, that it was a secret. There were lots of secrets in my life, too many secrets.

Over the course of the next year I met the rest of the Squad. My sixth Birthday was spent behind Detective Stabler's desk, listening to my Aunt finally deciding to press charges against my Uncle, she told Olivia she was going to get a divorce. Detective Munch was talking to me, because he said I looked sad. I told him it was because it was my birthday and everyone was ignoring me. He walked over to his desk, and pulled out a bottle of coke. He gave it to me as a birthday gift, and in my simple six-year-old mind, that made me happy. I think that's the first time any of them heard me giggle, because they all looked at me when a let out a tiny giggle of joy, even my aunt was surprised. It was one of the only times that I saw the look of accomplishment in the squads eyes, as though I was the proof that they were doing something good.

Before my seventh birthday my Aunt married someone new. His name was Timothy; I simply called him Uncle Tim. I didn't like him, from the moment he walked through my aunt's front door, to the day he walked down the aisle with her on his arm. The entire squad was sitting in the second row, and then at one of the front tables at the reception. He smiled flakily at the reception, and they all said he seemed like a nice man. I just nodded; I assumed that he would grow on me. It would be the last night I would see them for a long time, Tim didn't like the police. Seven months latter Elizabeth was born, Auntie began to pay more attention to her then to Timothy, in turn he began to pay more attention me.

He liked to take pictures, lots of pictures. Especially when I was in the bath, or when I was changing. He would call me his little model; he said that I was beautiful and that one day I would make lots of money. My eighth birthday rolled around. From my Aunt, Uncle and baby Elizabeth I got a bike, in secret Uncle gave me a "gift" he tapped us late at night, the night he stole my innocence. That's when I learned to hate my birthday. From there on my modeling career became more provocative, and uncomfortable. It grew harder and harder to find time for "us" and uncle would call our morally wrong relationship.

Late one Saturday night, when Auntie and Elizabeth were off at Baby-N-Me classes, Uncle undressed me and had me posed on the bed. He set up his camera, and began to take his photos, he was so busy he didn't hear the door being broken down, he didn't hear five thudding sets of footsteps coming up the stairs. It wasn't until he kissed me on my yet developed breasts, and Detective Tutuola shouted police for the umpteenth time and yanked him off of me, did he realized that we were not as alone as he thought.

My eyes were wild with fear as the Captain dropped his jacket around me and hugged me close. I was so afraid, they weren't supposed to know, it was a secret. Uncle Tim was yelling at me, calling me names that I had no clue of there meaning, he accused me of telling them. It was then that I broke down, I was sobbing screaming to him that I didn't tell anyone, I swore on Bobby that I had never told a soul, I asked him to forgive me. Before he could answer Fin "accidentally" ran him into the doorframe. Munch took me back to my room so I could get some of my things, I put on some clothes, and grabbed my one true friend, the stuffed dog was looking rather worn, but it was okay to me, he was still soft, and he still listened when I cried.

Olivia and Elliot let me ride in their car back to the station house, I stared out the window at the falling rain. As I sat in the brightly coloured room, on tiny chairs holding on to dear life the only thing that was constant in my life (Bobby), a new man came to talk to me. He told me his name was Dr. Huang. I liked him, he was nice, and he never asked me what my Uncle did to me, which I liked because then I didn't have to break the promise. When my Aunt showed up about two hours later, with a sleeping Elizabeth, she was in complete shock at what the angry detectives told her. For someone her age she was both naïve and unobservant.

I slept silently in the crib at the station house that night. Content that everything was going to be fine. The next morning I awoke to the face of Ms. Novak. A young woman who had a kind smile. I began to see that there were too places in my life, the lonely dangerous place of my home, and the friendly safe environment of the sixteenth precinct. After the court case, which I testified at, I asked Munch to marry me. He appeared shocked, and said that he couldn't, I told him that he could, and if he did then I would never have to go back to the place I hated. His old eyes looked so sad and tired. Elliot told me that it would be a better place now because the bad man wouldn't be coming back. Well he was kind of right. While Uncle Tim was rotting in jail, Uncle Karl came crawling back.

Like a snail on a hot day looking for a cool place to hide Uncle Karl came slithering back to the familiarly pond of Auntie Bev. He said that he was a changed man, that he no long did those nasty drugs. Which in fact he had, he had switched to drinking. I soon became his favourite if for no other reason then that I was closer in blood then Elizabeth. He took to hating the child that was only two. He poured me my first beer on my nineth birthday, and thus began our ritual.

Every Friday night we would drink together, my tiny body passing out way before his, and as I lay passed out on the floor he would beat my aunt and cousin. This went on for about six months until I woke up one Saturday, hung over, with a splitting headache, to find our suburban home had been painted red. It wasn't until I had fully come to conscious that I realized it was blood. My aunt lay dead only a few feet from where I had been passed out; Elizabeth's tiny body lying lifeless at the bottom of the stairs, and Karl was hanging from the rafters.

I did the only thing I knew, I went up to my room, sat in the corner and hugged Bobby as tight as I could. It wasn't long before the familiar detective I had grown to love and trust appeared in the door. A neighbour had called the police, and homicide had called the Special Victims Squad when they found me covered in blood in the corner. I didn't speak to any of them, my dead eyes looked past them; they could smell the alcohol that was seeping from my clothes and breath. Elliot picked me up, and cradled me as though I was an infant, Olivia placed a coat over my head so I wouldn't see, but I already new the massacre that lay in our living room.

Huang spoke to me once more at the precinct. It was there that I proclaimed that I was done. He asked me what I had completed. I told him matter-of-factly, that I no longer am going to care about anything, that it was just easier not to feel anything. The look of concern in his eyes hurt, so I told him, and the rest of the squad that there was no use caring about me because people that care about me only end up hurt. I think Olivia cried when I said this, but I don't know, because I had blocked out the world.

Spending the rest of that year at a rehab centre for children, the squad visited me for my stay there. I was released to my first foster family on my tenth birthday. Shifted from home to home for the next six months until I came rest with Mr. Anderson. When will adults learn, things that seem too good to be true usually are. He spent our first three months breaking me with a wooden two-by-four. The welts and bruises were there if anyone had bother to look. After that I would get a good beating once a week whether I needed it or not. On my eleventh birthday I had enough.

My first night on the street was tough, but as the weeks passed it got easier. I would steal what food I could, and what I couldn't steal I would scavenge for. After six weeks of living on the street I met Emma. She was a large chunky lady who said if I did things for her she would pay me. This sounded like a good deal, all I had to do was stand on the corner and if someone came up to me and said the "password" I would give them a plastic bag, they would give me money. I would take it back to her where she would give me fifteen percent. This gave me enough money to buy food and clothes, on really cold nights I would sleep in a closet in her apartment.

Sometimes she would have upwards of four children sleeping in a closet, we were all her little helpers, and she paid the other much less. This is what first tipped of the authorities. If she had just let on sleep at a time, if she had only been more careful, then maybe she wouldn't have been caught. If I had known to run, run when Detective Tutuola had come up and given the password. If only I had known.

This time they could not protect me. Although I am sure they treated me much better then they would have if they had not known me, they still had to book me. They all sat in the courtroom at my trail, on the same day as my twelfth birthday. Munch had brought me a bottle of coke. Since it was my first offence, and I won over the judge I was remanded to community service. I had lied when they asked me where I was staying; I gave them a fake address. I showed up for every service hour, and then went to sleep in a youth shelter. After my three months were over I went to visit the sixteenth precinct. I appeared to be happy, they all appeared to be concerned, by this time they had figured out that I was not living where I had said I was living.

The Captain was concerned I was living on the street. I know that they all meant well when they contacted Mr. Anderson, but when the board man walked through the door, my face turned white. He hugged me and said he had been so worried about me, that I now I would have friends living at his house with me. If the squad hadn't looked so happy at the way he treated me I would have screamed and begged them not to send me home with him, but they all looked happy for me, I couldn't break them again.

The next night I turned up at the sixteenth precinct battered and bruised. They asked me what had happened. I stared at the ground; I wanted to know if they would believe me, even if it sounded funny. They said that they would. Lying I said that I fell down the stairs at school, and I didn't want to tell Mr. Anderson because he would think I made it up. Olivia looked at me, and told me I that my story was made up because stairs would not break a person that bad. I lifted my big blue eyes from the floor, looking her square in the eyes, I replied it a way much to old for my age, I spoke softly; "Something that is broken can be fixed, I am way past the point of repair".

It was then that Fin escorted a suspect out of the interview room. The suspect, and man in his thirties, looked at me with such evil. An evil I had only seen once before, an evil that had resided in Uncle Tim. I knew that as soon as our eyes meet the detective had realized their error. The evil man was quickly escorted out of the door. Fin apologized to me; I looked at him with my sad and tired blue eyes, and told him not to bother. "I can look after myself," and with that I smiled, stood my sore body up and waved goodbye to them. The next few months passed quickly, I returned to the man who sheltered and beat me.

Days before my thirteenth birthday I was walking alone home from school, when I saw the evil man again. He was waiting for me at the corner; he invited me for a ride. I knew better, but when I refused four of his buddies appeared. I dropped my backpack and ran as fast as I could. I have never been fast enough, that day was no exception. Firm hands pulled me into a black van. We drove to an old warehouse, where a concrete room and old bed became my home. They pretended to be nice, they pretended to care, but I knew they only wanted one thing from me. So there I was, a twelve-year-old girl who had suffered through so much to the point that I no longer felt, and was being beating and raped by old men. Okay so thirty isn't that old, but for someone who isn't going to make it to the ripe old age it is very very old.

It is my thirteenth birthday today. I am lying on the bed with some strange man inside of me, another beating me, and three others laughing. The next thing I know S.W.A.T.s busted down my concrete prison door. Fin is pulling the evil man out of me beating him to the ground, and I am lying exposed to the world again. I have nothing left, my pride is gone, my hope is gone, and this is it. A coat is once again placed over my bloody and twisted body. Olivia is stroking my hair telling me too "just hold on a little longer sweetie, just fight it a little longer," Munch is standing behind her, Elliot at the end of the dirty bed, and Fin who has passed of the evil man to a uniform officer standing somewhere in-between. I can see the Captain in the shadows, he steps out when we make eye contact.

"I can't," I say, my words weak, yet my voice still soft.

"Get a Bus damn it!" Cragen yells at some poor young rookie.

"Come on, I will buy you a case of coke," Munch smiles. I laugh but I begin to cough and spit of blood, all over Olivia's grey pinstriped suit.

"Sorry," I raise my hand to wipe it off,

"Its okay, don't worry, just fight a little longer sweetie,"

"Fight…" my vision begins to blur, "I am been fighting for so long, I am so tired of fighting," my voice trails off, as a tear falls from my blue eyes, my blond hair sticking to my face with blood. As I take my last breath, and close my eyes for the last time, I can't help but smile. I am dieing in the arms of someone who cared about me, surrounded by the only people I have ever trusted. The only people since my parents that I truly, unconditionally, loved.

* * *

_I am being buried today, in a dress that I never wore while I was alive, a dress that the team purchased with there own money. It is a beautiful prom dress, a dress for a stage of my life that I will never reach. They are there, all of them, wondering where they went wrong. In my arms is Bobby, not quite as old as I, but just as worn._

* * *

**So thats it, please R&R it would be greatly apprechiated.**


End file.
